Pete's Log: New Adventures in Sway
Entry #2176, (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)(posted when I was 44 years old.)
After some recent Debian updates, Sway on Esgerbeastie has started behaving differently in (at least) two ways.
The first is that my script that launches my workspace 1 stopped working right. ncmpcpp was missing entirely and the other windows were stacked vertically instead of being in a grid. Some quick troubleshooting led me to discover that something was now taking longer to launch, and thus I had to change the "sleep 0.2s" statements in my script to "sleep 0.5s" to get things to work. Which yes I know was a hacky way to be doing things, so I've now updated the script to poll for the windows to exist instead of just sleeping.
The other difference is that my alpine window now gets a red border when it's not focused and I receive a new message. It's a bit angry for my liking, so I think I want to change it back, but I'm still figuring out the right way to do that.
swaymsg get_tree output indicates that the difference in the window before and after receiving a new message is that the urgent flag gets set. Interestingly, man 5 sway claims "Note: Native Wayland windows do not support urgency. Urgency only works for Xwayland windows." But I am quite certain this is a native Wayland window. Further digging found that sway 1.7 introduced "Wayland-native urgency," but it looks like sway 1.7 made it into Debian testing back in April and I've certainly done updates since then. So I'm not sure which piece of the puzzle changed with the latest updates, all I know is now my alpine window looked angry when I get new email. So for now I've updated my sway config to make urgent windows use a red that better matches my color scheme and to also just use less of it. I'll see how I like it.
Firefox has also been acting up of late. Really, I should probably just switch Esgerbeastie over to Debian stable instead of Debian testing. But where's the fun in that?